Spencer Roane: The Forgotten Founder

 

A review of Irreconcilable Founders: Spencer Roane, John Marshall, and the Nature of America’s Constitutional Republic (LSU Press, 2021) by David Johnson

Of all the leading Jeffersonians of the early Republic—Jefferson, Madison, John Randolph of Roanoke, and John Taylor of Caroline—Spencer Roane is arguably the most obscure. This obscurity is lamentable because while Jefferson and Madison built and led their party, and Randolph defended it with colorful and memorable bromides on the floors of Congress, and Taylor preached it to the masses by publishing treatises, Roane served as the Jeffersonian’s judge. A member of the Virginia Court of Appeals from 1795 to his death in 1822, Roane’s ardent defense of state sovereignty and Jeffersonian republicanism rub against the traditional story of early nineteenth-century American constitutional and jurisprudential history. That story fêtes the “Great” and “Heroic” Chief Justice John Marshall as the progenitor of modern American constitutionalism, riding his quadriga of constitutional nationalism in triumph while vanquishing his foes into “a deep and dark historical twilight.” Roane’s defense of Jeffersonian principles, so the story continues, represented one of the last significant gasps of strict construction and state sovereignty before becoming the crude and moldy relic of Southern opposition.

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